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Global aid effort in Haiti a dismal failure, author says

Reporter and author Jonathan Katz sets the scene for the post-earthquake &ldquo;betrayal&rdquo; by the international community in his new book.

The Hyppolite iron market in downtown Port-au-Prince -- at left after the earthquake as it burned on January 29, 2010, and at right on Jan. 10, 2013. Left image: Reuters Photo/Jorge Silva. Right: AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery. (REUTERS / AP PHOTOS)

This is how it sounded at 4:53 p.m. to Jonathan Katz, The Associated Press correspondent in Haiti, who thought, in the instant, that he was hearing a water truck.

Until the bed started to vibrate.

Until Katz founded himself at the epicentre, three years ago Saturday, of the deadliest natural disaster in the Western Hemisphere, documented now in his just-released The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.

Katz noted what he calls a “walking back” of the international co-operation minister’s earlier comments, made to La Presse, that Canada’s assistance to the perennially stricken nation is “on ice.” In an interview with the Star, Katz noted dryly, “You don’t normally see Hillary Clinton or (USAID administrator) Rajiv Shah. . . just sort of walking down the street and then accidentally making policy as they’re giving an interview to one newspaper or another.”

Even the policy clarification was an elision. From 2006 to 2012, the Canadian International Development Agency has disbursed $925.6 million to Haiti (2012 numbers are preliminary), but almost all of that has been directed through bilateral and multilateral arrangements that run the gamut from a $50,000 payment to a magazine for the production of three on-the-ground features in Haiti, to $20 million to the Pan American Health Organization for free-of-charge health services delivered in-country through a network of hospitals and medical clinics.

CIDA did not respond to a request to provide a dollar figure for direct budget support to the government of Haiti, but the most recent analysis from the office of the special envoy for Haiti, released this week, reveals that just 2.4 per cent of all bilateral funding has been directed to the Haitian treasury. Haiti’s minister of economy and finance, Marie Carmelle Jean-Marie, was quoted saying Haiti has not “one gourde” from Canada in its budget.

The scattered, indirect funding has played perfectly into Katz’s book launch. “If they want to make the case that they have to go around governments and fund the UN and NGOs and their own NGOs and their projects and priorities, then they can make that case,” he says, on the phone from book promotion in New York. “But then they need to be held accountable whether or not they have achieved the goals they have set for themselves and when those goals are not achieved. It needs to be an honest accounting and it needs to say, look, we didn’t give all this money to the Haitian government. They didn’t steal it. Maybe they would have stolen it if we had given it to them, but we didn’t even try that.”

Katz had been in Haiti for two and a half years when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit. Prior to that moment he had decided that he was “done” with the island nation. Haiti’s a hard full-time file for a journalist and Katz had already waded through disaster, including the four hurricanes and tropical storms that struck the island in a space of just four weeks in August and September 2008.

Donors, Katz writes, “had spent years promising engineering projects and long-term investments to keep the rivers from flooding again, but only a small percentage of the pledged funds had been delivered, and much of it had been committed to reports, pilot projects and overhead. In the end, the same exact rivers flooded in the same exact way they had flooded a few years before, and the aid workers simply came back.”

There’s plenty enough material with which Katz sets the scene for the post-earthquake “betrayal” by the international community. And, as is often the case in Haiti, the stories are packed with ironies and sadnesses.

Such is the story of Collège la Promesse Evangelique, a school in the ravine below the grand homes of Pétionville, run by a protestant preacher named Fortin Augustin. “In the summer of 2008, hoping to cash in on the slum’s growth, he added a third storey,” Katz writes. “To save money, as he had with the floors below, he instructed his crew to use low-quality concrete made of sand blasted from hillsides. The workers mixed it with extra water to stretch the material. Augustin also skimped on the iron rebar that reinforced load-bearing walls.”

On the morning of Nov. 7, 2008, a Friday, the school collapsed. “Down the precipitous slope, two and a half stories’ worth of concrete keeled toward the ravine. Hundreds of men dug with sledgehammers and their bare hands, pulling out whomever they could find.” Men carried the bodies of broken children, Katz writes, some already dead. Perhaps 100 dead in all. The mayor of Port-au-Prince would later tell him that 60 per cent of the city’s buildings were unsafe and should be razed. Yes there was, ostensibly, a building code. No, it was not followed.

René Préval became obsessed with the school’s collapse. Katz reports that the president would harangue foreign envoys, requesting metal classroom trailers to replace the unstable concrete schools. “Diplomats wondered openly if he’d started drinking again,” writes Katz, who noted the president’s frequent return to La Promesse, which, for $200 a year, promised a better future for the children of impoverished Haitians. Again and again Préval returned, “until no one cared that he was there.”

Prior to the tragedy of La Promesse, Préval addressed the United Nations in New York, reflecting on the hurricane assistance that had come flooding in to his country. “I am worried,” he said, before a sadly small audience, “because I dread that once the first wave of solidarity and human compassion has dried up, we will be left, as always, alone but truly alone, to deal with new catastrophes and to see restarted, as if in a ritual, the same exercises of mobilization.”

It is from this place of deep knowing and understanding that Katz, on the fateful January afternoon, began what may ultimately rest as the most thorough in-the-moment account of the earthquake.

“I lowered myself, or maybe I fell. Then a shove came the other way. Then another, and another. Suddenly the house was an airplane in the storm. . . The world turned grey and everything blurred, things falling, long after there should have been nothing left to fall.”

Katz lived, as did the preponderance of employees from the UN and the embassies and the NGOs, in the “Blan Bubble” — the nuance of the Kreyòl word blan meaning more broadly foreigner than white.

Hard and caring work was done. “The problem often was that these individuals were merely the vanguard of distant, massive organizations whose managers seemed less interested in nuances or painful lessons on the ground,” Katz writes. “And their — our — ability to report back those nuances was inhibited by the fact that we were viewing life through a bubble, separated by language, class and divisions that stretched back farther than Haitian history.”

Post-earthquake, the bubble emerged in the form of the UN briefings, held behind concertina wire on the UN’s Logbase way out by the airport, and in the cluster system established to deal with the emergency. “Haitians other than government officials and especially blessed representatives of this group or that group weren’t able to get in,” says Katz. “So despite the fact they were holding these meetings in Haiti, they were holding them very much at a remove.” He calls the cluster system “crazy.”

Katz recounts a moment when he viewed, scrawled on a Logbase bathroom stall, the message, in all caps:

“Haiti: Hell on Earth, what do we do now?”

To which another scribe had appended:

“The Answer is not in Logbase or in your email.”

“That kind of parallax was going on in Haiti,” says Katz. “Yeah, it was bad. It was bad because when you’re cut off like that, you’re not talking to people who are actually living the lives that you’re trying to improve.”

Still, Katz held out hope. After the hurricanes, after the floods, Katz was among those who believed that a game changer, something “massive and transformative” would surely break the cycle of the past failures of international efforts, having faith in the words of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowing that there would not be a return to “failed strategies.”

“There was that commitment and that bomb did go off and that wasn’t enough to break the cycle.”

There is heartbreak in the search and rescue, as Katz joined the throngs of the desperately impoverished of Carrefour, hand-digging at rubble, hearing of the high-end rescue being deployed at the swish Hotel Montana. “You could see the military planes overhead, so they knew they were there,” he recalls. “They were very confused. They couldn’t understand why this help was coming to Haiti but it was not coming to them.”

There is the heartbreak in the country’s first-ever cholera epidemic, which Katz aggressively pursued to a UN base in the central plateau and which today has claimed more than 7,000 lives. That, he says, was a major factor in framing his post-disaster outlook, “that it was brought by the United Nations, that it was brought by ostensible responders and then those responders refused to be held accountable for their actions or even consider their own accountability.”

There is deep disappointment that the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, led by Bill Clinton and designed to be an interim step to a long-term Haitian led recovery commission, went nowhere. Katz calls it an “epic failure.”

Yes, rubble has been cleared and many tent camps have been emptied. But, Katz writes, “Nearly all who return to standing homes, even the several thousand repaired with money in the aid effort, are back in buildings just like those that collapsed before the earthquake.”

Building successes include what Katz calls “high-priced hotels for foreigners” and an industrial park, Caracol, backed by South Korea’s Sae-A Trading Co. and meant to create as many as 20,000 jobs. Caracol’s funding, however, was teed up prior to the earthquake, part of Haiti’s U.S.-supported initiative to grow jobs in garment manufacture. “It’s not a success in terms of responding to the earthquake and I think the argument is very hard to make that it’s going to contribute to the long-term amelioration of the situation in Haiti,” says Katz.

Meanwhile, a diminishing NGO community has led to a drop in consumption, which in turn has led to recession, says Haitian economist Pierre Marie Boisson. Food costs are rising.

In The Big Truck That Went By, Katz recalls the morning of Jan. 13, when “what had been concealed by the darkness was now impossible to ignore.” His recount is part self-reflection, looking into the moment when he chose to stay reporter instead of rescuer, when he chose to do what he believed would be the best good. In the immediate horror, he became, he writes, “increasingly agnostic on the question of whether I was still alive.”

He doesn’t say at what precise moment he took the time to study photographs he had taken, blindly, in the dusty dark of the night before. He knows that in the gloom of Jan. 12 he took a photo, “Deep in the dark expanse,” of a man unseen to him at the time. Only with the photo could he make out clearly this man, clearly in terrible pain, a man who was trying to say something.

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